Google Spies Caught.

An interesting apology on New Zealand news tonight.

It seems that when Google spies when around taking pictures for their streetview maps, they were also recording all the houses that had a wireless internet connection.

It does beg the question as to what business it is of Google how many people have wireless internet.  No doubt it is part of market research of some kind – what kind of service are Google scoping out the market for?

Personally, if they can provide me a better service I am all for it.  Did they need to be so covert?  Are they doing something that any other person with a scanner can not do?

I live well away from any neighbours and had not bothered setting up security on my wireless connection because I didn’t want to go to the effort of synchronizing my computers. That was until I noticed someone parked on the side of the road stealing my bandwidth. The person was in a work vehicle (does his boss know how he spends his day) and was parked partially obstructing the road as there is nowhere to pull off the road near my house.

After unplugging his connection, and phoning his employer, I have since installed security. But the point is that he was doing no more than the Google spies travelling around looking for an open wireless connection.  I presume Google wasn’t looking to steal bandwidth – or were they?

Big Brother caught with their pants down again. How embarrassing to be Google slapped!